Build Your Own Wicked Wordpress Themes [Kindle Edition]

I received the book Friday afternoon (8/20/2010) and finished reading it Sunday (8/22/2010), and my head is still spinning ... but in a good way. I am about three weeks new to WordPress, and I have to say that it's overwhelming trying to learn about everything that makes it what it is. I had been reading through the codex ([...]), which is a tremendous resource by the WordPress folks, but it has been difficult for me to tie it all together. This book is a great primer to theme building with WordPress and will help you to understand the main components that make up the WordPress software, and it does so in a pleasant and organized way. I dabble in web design, but my profession is that of web development and programming, and I'm pleased to say that this book, while aimed at web designers, will encourage the curiosity of developers alike.

I had some reservations about the book having four authors, as the flow of a tech book doesn't always work when there are too many "experts" coming to the table. I'm pleased to say that the book flows quite well, and the language and format with which the authors use to explain theme building is mostly consistent and cohesive. The only problem I had was in chapter 7: Theme Options, as it felt like the author of this chapter was jumping around a bit and not quite as organized and detailed with some of the explanations, and perhaps rushing a bit. Otherwise, I now feel much more confident in WordPress and theme building from not only a 10,000 foot view, but a 1,000 foot view as well. As with anything tech, you have to "pop the hood", and get your hands dirty, and I now feel like I can thanks to this book.

The book is broken into 8 chapters ... interestingly, each chapter fundamentally builds upon the last, but you could easily make a quick pass through the book to get familiarized with WordPress and themes, and then use it as a high-level reference thereafter (and using the codex will probably make much more sense after moving through this book). The chapters are:

1. Introducing WordPress
2. Planning Your Theme
3. Theme Design 101
4. Theme Frameworks
5. Advanced Theme Construction
6. Widgets
7. Theme Options
8. Selling Your Theme

I bought this book with two ideas in mind: learn about the "guts" of WordPress from a high level, and understand what goes into a WordPress theme to eventually make and sell them, and the book moves you forward in the right direction. This book, IMO, does a very good job of covering a great deal of ground in a short amount of time. I have only started to work on converting my business website to WordPress, but this book, and the information in it, has given me the confidence to play and experiment, and really go after the inner workings of the Thematic framework.

Thanks to SitePoint for a great book on the topic!

I read my decent share of Wordpress books so far, probably a dozen of them. So far this is one of the better ones, maybe the best, at least for me. Personally I am a designer with some basic coding skills in PHP. Setting up scripts from scratch is something I am not too good at, but I can understand scripts by reading them and tweaking them to my needs. This book helped me to understand PHP a little more and especially the ins and outs of Wordpress.

This book is probably not the best book to read in order to get rolling with your theme development, it is a bit too advanced for that. But after one or two other books serving you the typical spoon-fed chunks of what Wordpress is and how to install it, this book is great. It introduces you to the concept of frameworks, child-themes and action-hooks and filters. This might scare a lot of people away, but once you get the hang of it you will love the concept. If you are serious about developing professional themes you have to read this book.

There is an ebook version available as well.

The major part of the book is a showcase of wordpress powered websites. I have an intermediate level of wordpress I was expecting learn a few things or tricks for work with wordpress as a CMS. But after a looot of images and zero code, they begin "Building a Theme" and it's just create a child theme for Thematic. I think the fun part of wordpress it is build a theme from scratch.

It's a shame because I'm a big fan of sitepoint I own a couple more of books from theme but this one is just a showacase, that's it.